which is one of the most hopeful features of contemporary religious
life--is essential to any group-scheme for the general and social
furtherance of the spiritual life. It is not to be denied for a moment,
that countless good men and women who love the world in the divine and
not in the self-regarding sense, are busy all their lives long in
forwarding the purposes of the Spirit: which is acting through them, as
truly as through the conscious prophets and regenerators of the race.
But, to return for a moment to psychological language, whilst the Divine
impulsion remains for us below the threshold, it is not doing all that
it could for us nor we all that we could do for it; for we are not
completely unified. We can by appropriate education bring up that
imperative yet dim impulsion to conscious realization, and wittingly
dedicate to its uses our heart, mind and will; and such realization in
its most perfect form appears to be the psychological equivalent of the
state which is described by spiritual writers, in their own special
language, as "union with God."

I have been at some pains to avoid the use of this special language of
the mystics; but now perhaps we may remind ourselves that, by the
declaration of all who have achieved it, the mature spiritual life is
such a condition of completed harmony--such a theopathetic state.
Therefore here to-day, in the worst confusions of our social scramble,
no less that in the Indian forest or the mediæval cloister, man's really
religious method and self-expression must be harmonious with a
life-process of which this is the recognized if distant goal: and in all
the work of restatement, this abiding objective must be kept in view.
Such union, such full identification with the Divine purpose, must be a
social as well as an individual expression of full life. It cannot be
satisfied by the mere picking out of crumbs of perfection from the
welter, but must mean in the end that the real interests of society are